Today (Tuesday, July 8), earn 12%, instead of the usual 6%, on purchases made from eBags! Ebates has a coupon link good for an extra 20% off, AND orders over $50 ship free! (Free returns, too!) Does it GET any better than that? I don't think so! :)

AND, if you're not already a member of Ebates, they'll give you a FREE $5 bonus when you join and make your first purchase! -- Join Ebates today! (aff)

This makes an already great program even more attractive.

If you're not a member and would like to read my review of MrRebates, click here. To join with my referral link, please click here -- thanks!

Wellness360 pays members for doing health-related activities like reading articles, tracking your vitals, updating exercise and food diaries, completing a health risk assessment, and more. Be sure to stay on each page for 10 seconds in order to get credit.

Wellness360 also just launched a community, so be sure to sign up for that for 250 bonus points.

To read my full review of Wellness360, click here. To go ahead and join Wellness360, please click here to join as my referral.

Not a member of E-Rewards? It's only open by invitation; look for invites sent by your frequent flyer program or Blockbuster. You'll be able to earn E-Rewards for completing surveys, and you can cash your earnings out for redemptions including FF miles, magazine subscriptions, Borders Rewards Bucks, shopping discounts, and more.

This contest is only open to members of Ebates. If you're not already a member, please join here (aff) -- thanks!

Participating troops will have until July 20th to redeem their points; after that time, unredeemed points will be donated to the USO, AnySoldier.com, and Fisher House.

MyTroops launched in January 2007 and was designed to allow members to assign their online shopping rebates to a deployed serviceman. A unique idea to support a noble cause -- I'm sorry to hear the site will be closing. Mitch, thank you for your continued service to our country, and my best to your wife and family.

Ebay doesn't appear in the master list of merchants on Live Cashback, I found. But if you do a Microsoft Live search for something and an Ebay result comes up, it will tell you how much cash back you can expect to receive on that item.

Example. I've been considering buying a nifty gadget called a Negative Scanner (it scans in film negatives so you can digitize the pics on them). I did a Live Search for "negative scanner" and the results had an Ebay product listing that said I could get 25% cashback if I paid with PayPal.

I chose an item ($99.99 plus shipping), clicked to Buy It Now, and on the confirmation page, sure enough, it said, "Microsoft Cashback 25%, US $24.99. Pay with PayPal, claim your cashback with Microsoft, and get it in 60 days." How awesome is that?

Not all Ebay purchases qualify for 25% cash back. In Mashable's example, they don't say what they searched for, but they were offered 10% cash back. I did a search for Xbox 360 Rock Band and it offered me 2%. So the amount is going to depend on the particular item (or maybe the category). I also found these Terms and Conditions for the Live Search Cashback on Ebay. It's important to note that the cashback only applies to the first purchase made after clicking through from Live Search results.

In any event, the rewards for Ebay BIN purchases is just another positive selling point for the already-great Program Formerly Known As Jellyfish Cashback.

Wellness360 pays you for reading articles about health-related topics, completing a health risk assessment, updating an exercise and food diary, entering your daily medications, updating your vitals, and more! Be sure to stay on each page for 10 seconds or more in order to get credit. Don't abuse the program, please -- they expect the average person to earn $10 to $20 per month.

My review of Wellness360 is here; or you can go ahead and join here.

The Borders Rewards program is free, but you can't join online. Pick up a card at your local store, then register it online to receive the latest coupons and sales by email. Plus, for every $150 you spend, you get $5 in Borders Bucks good toward a future purchase.

More information is here. The program is free to join if you're not already a member -- sign up here.

He wrote a great article
last week that was picked up by USA Today, called, "Are online rewards programs better than the airlines?"

The article mentions some of the Ghosts of Rewards Programs Past, like Beenz, Flooz, Blink, and Cybergold. Winship says the number of online rewards programs has declined because they "overspent on infrastructure development, salaries and overhead, and indulged in wildly unrealistic revenue projections." He provided quotes from several popular programs' closure announcements -- interesting but sad reading.

From the perspective of the frequent flyer mile collector, he says, there's little reason to use programs other than the airline miles' own online shopping malls because the miles earned are competitive or sometimes better (versus, for instance, earning points at MyPoints and cashing out for airline miles) and also because so many non-airline rewards programs have gone by the wayside.

I wouldn't disagree with Mr. Winship's assessment -- from the standpoint of a miles collector. If your interest isn't in accumulating frequent flyer miles but is in earning actual cash back for your shopping purchases (as well as for other activities like completing surveys, visiting websites, etc.), there is still very much a reason to use non-airline online rewards programs.

I don't fly, or at least, not unless absolutely necessary. I'd rather earn cash back for shopping that I could use to buy a ticket on any airline (or preferably, to gas up my car to drive there instead). I don't have to earn $200 worth of miles to cash out from a non-airline rewards program...Ebates has a $5 minimum and there's no minimum for PayPal cashouts at a couple of programs including QuickRewards.net. Not knocking mile collectors or trying to start a "we're better than you" argument; just saying that for me, personally, earning miles isn't very appealing.

Enjoyed the article, though; it made some very good points, and it brought back memories of a lot of formerly great rewards programs that have since shut their doors.

Live Search Club offers points for playing games, and these points can be cashed out for a wide selection of items ranging from ringtone downloads (105 tickets) to frequent flyer miles (250 tickets for 100 miles) to t-shirts (1100 tickets) to 30GB Zunes (20,000 tickets).

If you're not a member yet, please see my review, with instructions on how to sign up for the program, here.

In this special alert, the BBB says that it has been "inundated" with 180 complaints about NetWinner, from residents of 40 states and Canada. The article recaps the site's decision to cancel pending payments but return double points to member accounts for use in entering drawings.

The President and CEO of the BBB of Southern Piedmont, Tom Bartholomy, is quoted as saying, "Before offering the games and prize structure, Netwinner should have determined how high their potential payout liability for the games might be. At the point that the financial payout became greater than the company could bear - or when Netwinner determined that players were accumulating more points than anticipated through whatever means they were using to win - the games should have been halted.”

If you're just hearing about this story, you may want to start by reading my review of NetWinner here -- and be sure to read all of the links in the Related Articles section to follow the timeline of how NetWinner got to this point.

If you're a NetWinner member and you have not done so yet, you can submit your complaint with the BBB here . Other potential consumer resources are located in a summary page here. And you may also want to sign up for an account on the Open Forum, an independent message forum for NetWinner members.

By the way, you all may be interested to know that NetWinner's site visitors are down 73% since the first of the year. I guess everyone's come to the same conclusion: why bother?